


to discover the universe all over again

by inoko



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Cliffhangers, F/F, First Time, hoshiumom and the discovery of self, this is the most self indulgent thing ive ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26443894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inoko/pseuds/inoko
Summary: What it's like to disobey your mother in favor of a girl you met in the northeast corner of a bar, or what might as well have been the edge of the universe.
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru’s Mother/Hoshiumi Kourai’s Mother
Comments: 13
Kudos: 69





	to discover the universe all over again

**Author's Note:**

> this is a little follow-up segment to my original piece [cataclysmic variable stars and their place in the universe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25674994) which is a brief look into hoshiumom and her upbringing. this can stand alone but I do recommend reading that first because it states 1) the situation with her mother 2) her sexuality crisis. since she doesn't have a name i always refer to her as she. i hope u enjoy this i had to take so many breaks writing it because it is so gay and i started blushing

_“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”_

_Neil Gaiman_

―

Girls, she learns, are soft in a way that the Earth both is and isn’t.

She doesn't listen to her mother for all the world's entirety, simply hides it well enough and does not chase after what she wants. That is the easiest part, she thinks, since she has been running away from herself from the ripe age of fourteen.

She watches “ _sinful_ ” things, passes by sex shops but does not step inside. During class periods she looks towards the girl who sits next to her in lecture, the one with freckle constellations, and she wants, yearns, _touches_ , just once, to get the same girl’s attention when she leaves her notebook behind on the seat. 

The skin that she memorizes is delicate like sheet fabric underneath legs that writhe but solid like a home; not unlike the Earth or rocky planets, the four closest to the sun. 

She learns during one of her class periods that the deepest layer of the Earth, the inner core, the middle, is pressurized to the point the fever does not even matter― that despite it being hotter than the outer core, should melt like stone and sand and glass, it is as solid as the crust. That is how girls feel, at least to her, and she wants to swim in lava, set herself on fire and turn solid like the bones that keep us upright, run into a star and burn, burn more, burn again.

The glances she shares with her lab partner, lingering fingers that rest on shoulders and arms, and the nights she spends alone in her room while her flatmate is out dancing and loving and living are far different; lovely and gentle and small. She wants to trail her fingers down an arm that is lightyears away from her place in the universe; so all she can do is run her hand down her own. She wants to interlock fingers when she reaches the end of said arm, leave presses of lips against a stomach, know the way a neck curves into the shoulder. She wants to touch more than an arm, but she can’t.

She wants to touch, wants to learn, wants to know, but she can’t. She can never.

She learns herself instead.

―

After she turns twenty, the bars seem to call her with their flicker of lights and the burn of soju down her throat, a fireplace in the winter, when the world is heavy and the clouds hang overcast and the land feels sullen.

There are people that frequent her local place, she learns their faces and they learn her name, a privilege few people have. The bartender knows her order by now; not because she’s in here often but because it never changes― it is the same brand of soju, same medium ice, same each time around.

But there’s someone new, a new face, a new person in the midst of a few. She likes the quiet of this bar in particular, the absence of rowdy coworkers after hours, and this figure fits in fine: they are alone, hidden by the obscurity of the northeast corner by the bathroom, not with coworkers, a date, a friend. The figure does not know what it's like here, she can tell, and therefore does not know her or her order or her name or what her voice sounds like.

The dark image, no more a person than a shadow, steps out from their place in the umbra and begins to walk. Step by step, meter by meter, until she hears the squeak of a chair right next to her, the push and pull of a body that sits, rests on barely-comfortable seating. 

The figure is a girl, smooth and unbroken― no birthmarks or moles or freckles that disappear under her shirt, craters in her skin. There is nothing but planes, cold and silken and dark. She wants to touch. She wants to touch _so_ badly, but she doesn’t. She reads the menu over and over, memorizes the daily specials that haven’t been changed since the first time she came, memorizes each word like she memorizes pebbles and skin of girls she can’t have.

 _Margarita with lime, Cosmopolitan, Bailey’s Comet_ ―

There is a hand on her shoulder.

“Oh.” She says in lieu of a greeting. Her brain catches up to her mouth, and she watches the eyes that bore into her own make like a stream down her body, the slope of her collar and the way her hip protrudes. “Hi.”

“ _Please_.” It is desperation and heat and fire and she knows, then and there, that she had been wrong. This girl is not cold, not cold at all. Her craters are just in her throat, down her esophagus and into her stomach, down farther and farther and farther until―

She swallows, for she knows exactly what the figure (it is still just a figure if she believes it such, a _figure_ ) wants. She asks anyway, and her nerves twinge and she does not know peace at this moment or any. “Please what?”

“You’re beautiful. Come home with me?”

―

The figure is space, empty yet frantic, is every chemical reaction underneath a person’s crust that is so Earth-like, plates cracked, broken because of a core they cannot see. The figure is a girl, and she wants to find out what’s inside. 

The figure. Just a figure.

“First time?” There is a voice that feels disembodied, floats in the air, sits on the bed as its own person. There is a bed. They are planning to do unspeakable things on that bed.

She nods, does not look around the room at all, does not want to see the bookshelves or the closet. She does not want to know more about the figure (it is only a figure), so she does not move from the bedroom door. 

The voice speaks again. “I can tell.”

“I’m nervous.” She says, and the girl laughs. The girl. This girl. A girl at all. “Are you real?”

“I think so. You know―” It is no more than a whisper, but the voice is as loud as the sea she wishes, if only for a second, she could recreate. “Tell you what. Five steps. Only five. Let them be shaky. Let them be free to act as they please. And I will tell you right now that it is okay.”

She thinks. Does she listen to the figure? Why did she come? She should’ve said no. This is sacrilegious. Her mother would not want her to sit at the dining room table if she found out that a girl had touched her daughter in the way she plans to. 

  
  


_You want…  
  
_

_You want her so bad._

_You want this so much._

_Do something good for yourself, please._

“It’s okay if you don’t want to.”

_You want this so bad._

_You've been waiting for so_ long _._

_  
Give yourself. Take what you want.  
_

_Your mother isn’t here._

_You don’t have to tell._

“I want to.”

  
  


She steps, hypnotized by waves against rocks that line her shores. One foot after another. One more bit of space between galaxies cleared like it was never there. She moves at the speed of light, faster than the stars, and it is one. 

It _is_ shaky, broken, new; there’s two. 

She’s so nervous. She wonders if she’s doing this right. Three. 

Four, and she lets out a noise from the back of her throat as she watches her partner reach out and pull at the hem of her shirt.

 _Five_.

And there she is, in front of this girl, and she could reach out and touch a face or a neck or a side with the tips of fingers that only know the patterns of her own skin. 

She doesn’t, even though she wants to. She doesn’t know what’s hers to touch. She would want to connect the dots like they were constellations if this girl had any. There is a tattoo on a left shoulder blade, she notices. The girl. This is a girl in front of her. She could color it in.

“You’re shaking.” The voice, disembodied still, is low, not a whisper anymore. It sends a shiver up her spine. “ _Why_ are you so nervous?”

“My mother―” A gasp leaves her mouth with the touch that walks itself up her torso. “she said that―”

Figure, just a figure. “Is your mother here?”

“... No...”

“It’s just you and me.” Her hand, her _hand_. It presses its fingertips into her chest. That’s what blood feels like underneath skin. “I want this.”

She does not speak. There is nothing bound to the outer world. The bedroom is dark matter in space. 

Her eyes finally meet the figure’s again and she decides very quickly that she just wants it to be a girl, not a figure of one. A beautiful girl, with silk smooth planes, a girl who doesn’t feel real, a girl who is the exact opposite of her lecture partner. Harsh lines and a chipped tooth and three piercings in each ear. The backs of her thighs make contact with a lap, her hands with cold shoulders, her knees with the sheets of a bed that is not her own. There is an air about. Air that makes her uncomfortable, makes her shake, makes her want to throw her shirt off and swim naked in nothingness. It is good. It is really, really good.

“Do you?”

_Does she?_

“Yes.”

And so she allows herself to get lost in the feeling of interlocking fingers and kisses down her stomach and her lips learn the curve of a neck to a shoulder. She shakes, still, but the girl doesn’t comment anymore and she doesn’t talk about her mother. There is a mouth that tastes like ash and new materials in the universe and she swallows up those noises as if this is the last bite she’ll ever have to eat; a five-course meal when she was promised a single serving.

There is a tongue that soothes over the nips and pecks and bites she leaves, building a new constellation, bruises that are better than freckles, better than sundresses and picnics and spring breezes. She is one.

She drags her fingers up a thigh and yet it feels like more— like she touched a soul instead of a body or created the next element in the periodic table or wrote a poem about a place she’s never stepped foot in, not once. She is two, like helium, like her second step, shaky, barely a noble gas at all.

A finger, another, three. She is the third step but she no longer wonders if she’s doing this right. She simply allows, allows this stranger to have her, if only for a night, for a moment, for the time it takes a star’s energy to reach the surface of the planet.

Four, and she can see a binary star system, whether she is on her own or with another. This isn’t love, not even close, but she has taken violets from fields she does not have access to and laid them in her embrace, placed petals where only herself and this girl have touched, grown a new garden from the things she has stolen.

The last step, number five, a quintuple star system that won’t be found for a long, long time. She wonders if people have ever known heat, pleasure quite like this. She selfishly hopes she is the first, the first to feel this, so she can have one thing for herself. One thing to remember. One happy memory among the horrors.

Her mother would be ashamed. 

She allows the girl to leave a few stars extra, bruises and scratches and teeth marks that will stain her skin for weeks, just for that reason.

―

She does not learn the girl’s name, and the girl does not learn hers. There is the click of a door handle in place of goodbye. She switches her regular bar and orders a new brand of soju.

  
  


―

What would it have been like, to touch the stars eternally? Hoshiumi, newly fourty-five and tired of routine, wonders even now: what it would have been like to learn skin instead of star maps, to have gone back to that seat, that bar, her old order, to have seen that girl again. To ask for another: another drink, another whisper, another round.

If the body is just another form of the universe to question, then what lies beyond it? Is love a false narrative, a liar that tells a story and demands one in return? What if she has nothing to give? She does not want to question anything, but she is a woman of philosophy, and her mind runs a race against time.

She does not have another guided tour until 3 pm, so she busies herself sorting pamphlets and running errands for higher-ups. Because no matter her masters, she is just an astrophysicist. She will never be an astronaut or JAXA administrator. She is just a planetarium worker, just a mother, just a woman who lays violets in her lap. She is just Hoshiumi, and that’s okay. She is learning to come to terms with it.

She feels a figure still behind her, stop walking, recognize Hoshiumi by her hair or her stature or her hands. Meters that feel like nothing, like the person is right there, just a few millimeters away. She prepares for a “Hoshiumi”, a “Nice to see you here”, an “I forgot you worked at the planetarium!”

There is a shift of foot like the person is hovering, making sure it really is _Hoshiumi_ , maybe a friend she hasn’t seen in a while, an old neighbor, the child she used to tutor.

“Oh.” 

Hoshiumi recognizes that voice. Hoshiumi knows what that voice sounds like lost in the lackluster of pleasure, knows the human form the voice belongs to, noises incoherent but with Oxford dictionary definitions she could read from one of the papers she holds. 

“Hi.”

Her hands still around the leaflets. She is twenty again, newly baptized by touch and the patience it took and water that isn’t holy. She turns, starstruck, floating in a gravitational pull that does not belong to Earth or moon or star. This is not friend, neighbor, child; this is… This is―

_Please._

**Author's Note:**

> secretly the woman is oikawa's mom. Yes she is. But Mrs hoshiumi does not know this yet. anyway i am lesbian. i am.. i am lesbian. this is fine everything's fine i'm fine
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/lysihtea)


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